The Discursive Construction Of Gender Identity In Personal Weblogs

This thesis aims to study the discursive construction of gender identities (masculinities and femininities) in the genre of personal weblogs from the perspective of critical discourse analysis (CDA).As a latest genre of computer-mediated discourse (CMD), personal weblogs are offering a new forum for the presentation and construction of the social identities of bloggers (especially teenage bloggers), with gender identity being an important dimension.Since the 1990s, there have been a lot of general studies in the field of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and some researches in this field that highlight the most commonly found gender differences. However, relatively little systemic work has explored the presentation and construction of gender identities in CMD, especially the weblog discourse.Therefore, this study extends the empirical investigation of the discourse and gender relationship to personal weblogs, to gain a convincing understanding of the way gender identities of teenage (ages 13-18) bloggers are discursively constructed in personal weblogs.The main task of this study then is to answer some basic questions about how personal weblogs open up a new context for gender identity construction of teenage bloggers, based on a large amount of language data. Two major research questions thus are addressed in this study:1) How are gender identities presented in teenagers' personal weblogs? 2) How are gender identities of teenage bloggers discursively constructed in and through the weblog discourse?In order to address these questions, various approaches are employed in this thesis. First, content analysis is conducted in this thesis to examine various aspects of the presentation of gender identities in personal weblogs, laying the foundation for further analysis of the discursive construction of gender identities of teenage bloggers in personal weblogs. Second, CDA is employed as the basic theoretical and analytical framework for the analysis of the discursive construction of gender identities of teenage bloggers in personal weblogs. Specifically, this study adopts (1) Ruth Wodak et al.'s (1999,2009) theory of discursive construction of identity, formed in their studies on the discursive construction of national identity, as the background to the theoretical framework and (2) Norman Fairclough's three-dimensional framework for CDA (1992,1995) as the background to the analytical framework for data analysis. Third, this study draws support from methods in corpus linguistics (CL) to address the common criticisms about traditional CDA concerning its arbitrary selection of text and its analysis of a small quantity of texts.Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of 100 randomly selected teenage blogs, this study sheds some light on the way gender identities of teenage bloggers are presented and constructed in the weblog discourse.In terms of the presentation of gender identities of teenage bloggers in personal weblogs, this study finds that personal blogs provide a platform where teenagers can explore, present and perform their identities online, especially gender identities, in terms of personal information disclosure, online name selection, avatar selection, emoticons use and social characteristics of personal weblogs.In terms of the discursive construction of gender identities of teenage bloggers in personal weblogs, it is found in this study that teenage bloggers construct their gender identities mainly from three dimensions:blog themes or topics (e.g., daily events, school, interests and hobbies, romantic relationships, feelings and thoughts, families and friends, etc), discursive strategies (constructive strategies, perpetuation and justification strategies, transformation strategies and dismantling or destructive strategies) and linguistic means or devices (on the lexical level, syntactic level and pragmatic level).In conclusion, this study suggests that though discourse does not presuppose gender or gender identity, discursive practices (e.g., blogging) indeed interrelate dialectically with social practices (gender identity construction). Therefore, through critical discourse analysis of the weblog discourse, this study helps better interpret the presentation and discursive construction of gender identities of teenage bloggers in personal weblogs.